A blog series on women composers from the past and present

Morfydd Owen’s high achievements as a composer and performer, her movie-star looks, mercurial personality and mysterious death have all combined to ensure her posterity as the great lost hope of Welsh music. As we move into a New Year when many commemorations are planned to mark the centenary of her passing on 7 September 2018, I’m grateful to Angela Slater for this invitation to launch Illuminate’s blog series about women composers by reflecting on a remarkable creative artist whom I’ve been researching for the past 35 years.

Born in Treforest, Glamorgan, on 1 October 1891, Morfydd was considered a prodigy when she went to the piano of her own accord at the age of four and started composing at six. She followed the traditional Welsh apprenticeship of chapel and eisteddfod performances before entering University College, Cardiff, to study with David Evans as first holder of the Caradog Scholarship,1909-12. Morfydd played Grieg’s Piano Concerto in 1911 as well as hearing 20 of her own compositions performed in Departmental concerts. These scores were already unusual for a Welsh composer. All Morfydd's Cardiff songs set English words, for example, rather than Welsh; Mirage dabbles in whole tones; The Nightingale has a waywardly experimental vocal line, and Sea Drift, a scene for voice and orchestra, was written 16 years before the Welsh National Orchestra (now the BBC National Orchestra of Wales) came into being. To Our Lady of Sorrows, Morfydd’s finest song, also dates from this period, its craftsmanship and emotional intensity marking it out as a particularly remarkable achievement for a 20-year-old undergraduate in early 20th-century Wales.

Morfydd might well have become a teacher herself if not for a chance connection with Eliot Crawshay-Williams, the Liberal MP for Leicester. Recognising the quality of her work, he persuaded Morfydd - and her parents - that she should come to London to study composition with Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy of Music, 1912-17. Morfydd won every available prize at the end of her first year, including the Charles Lucas Silver Medal for her orchestral Nocturne. Hailed by Corder as one of the most individual student works ever heard, the impressionistic Nocturne was premiered at Queen's Hall in Langham Place in 1913, followed by a tone-poem based on the folk tune Morfa Rhuddlan [The Marsh of Rhuddlan] in 1914 and excerpts from a cantata, Pro Patria, in 1915. The critic of the Morning Post observed: ‘It would seem that in the process of time Wales, in the person of this clever young lady, will supply, is supplying a modern composer of whom much will be heard’ (1).

During her time at the Academy, Morfydd Owen became a member of Charing Cross Chapel and began to move in influential London Welsh circles. Her career was advanced by concert invitations and composition commissions from other Liberal MPs including David Lloyd George, H. Haydn Jones and J. Herbert Lewis, and she collaborated with Mrs Herbert Lewis to transcribe and arrange Welsh folksongs that she collected with a phonograph in Flintshire and Ceredigion. Tunes that are as familiar to us today as Gwn Dafydd Ifan [David Evans’ Gun] and Hela Llwynog [Fox Hunting] might well have been lost without this pioneering work.

The influence of folksong can also be seen upon Morfydd’s own composition such as the songs William and To Violets with their modal melodies and recurrent refrains. Other expressions of Welshness in exile include the Welsh-language settings Suo-Gân [Lullaby] and Gweddi y Pechadur [The Sinner’s Prayer] and the Four Welsh Impressions, piano miniatures that evoke favourite Welsh landscapes and close friends: Glantaf, Nant-y-Ffrith, Llanbryn-mair (sometimes called Waiting for Eirlys, a reference to Eirlys Lloyd Williams, an Academy contemporary) and Beti Bwt (Morfydd’s nickname for her best friend Elizabeth Lloyd, with whom she shared a flat in Hampstead, 1914-16).

There are wonderful vignettes of Morfydd in Hampstead: her penchant for riding in motorcycle sidecars and the flamboyant clothes and gargantuan hats that she wore to picnics on the Heath. She and Elizabeth moved in Bohemian circles that included D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Prince Felix Yusupov, Rasputin’s assassin. A psychiatry student, Alexis Chodak-Gregory, was reputed also to be a Russian Prince and asked Morfydd to marry him, attending services at Charing Cross to prove his devotion and saying that he would not be kept dangling. Morfydd applied successfully to the University of Wales for a grant of £100 to study in St Petersburg and consider how folk music might influence the musical development of Wales, but the project never materialised because of the Great War, then the Bolshevik Revolution, and her relationship with Alexis also broke up. Instead, she remained at the Academy and began taking singing as well as composition lessons. Morfydd’s songs give a real sense of her voice and performance style - a lyric mezzo with a knack for pianissimo mezza voce – and she gave concerts in Bath and Oxford before making her professional début at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street on 10 January 1917.

Morfydd Owen in 1915 (Private collection)

​1917 was also the year in which Morfydd married the Freudian psycho-analyst, Ernest Jones. Their clandestine wedding at Marylebone Register Office on 6 February – barely a month after her Aeolian Hall recital – was attended by none of her family and friends and continues to exert a potent fascination. Jones did not approve of his wife performing in public, so her diary soon dwindled dramatically. Her compositional output was also affected by serving as her husband’s secretary and proof-reader and organising the maids and meals at their West End flat and cottage in Sussex. These changes were particularly ill-timed because Morfydd was just beginning to achieve widespread recognition through publications by Boosey and Chappell and performances by leading soloists such as Robert Radford and Ben Davies at the Promenade Concerts and London Palladium. ‘Oh dear!’ she wrote to Eliot Crawshay-Williams on 22 July 1918: ‘Married life doesn’t seem to me to be quite the easiest thing to adapt oneself to, and has taken up all my time’ (2).

Morfydd’s time was actually about to run out altogether for she died six weeks after posting that letter on 7 September 1918 aged 26. The circumstances of the appendectomy performed at the home of her parents-in-law in Mumbles on the Gower Peninsula continue to raise more questions than they answer. Why was the operation carried out in a house when a major hospital was only moments away? Why was there no post mortem? And why was she buried without a death certificate? Official paperwork was filed a fortnight after the funeral had taken place at Oystermouth Cemetery.

Morfydd’s gravestone also contains errors and riddles, notably the German-language epitaph from Goethe’s Faust: ‘Das Unbeschreibliche / Hier ist’s getan’ [The indescribable / Here it is done]. Ernest Jones explained to Gilbert Tritschler, his wife’s first biographer, that the quotation meant ‘the pain & frightfulness of tearing two devoted people apart was indescribable, literally’ (3). But doesn’t it also hint at parallels with the Faustian narrative and a tragedy more multi-layered than may ever be known?

David Evans described Morfydd Owen as ‘an incalculable loss to Welsh music - in fact, I know of no young British composer who showed such promise’ (4). Frederick Corder recalled her ‘refined and beautiful talent’ (5), while the composer E. T. Davies wrote of ‘a grievous loss to Wales: here was a musician of outstanding genius cut off on the threshold of a career that would have shed lustre on her native country, and that might, quite well, have given a new direction to Welsh musical thought and endeavour’ (6).

Was Morfydd ‘an incalculable loss’? Well, she was certainly the pivotal figure in Welsh music at the turn of the twentieth century and one of the most versatile musicians that Wales has ever produced as a composer, singer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. By the time of her premature death, she had already produced a significant body of high-quality, meticulously-crafted work: some 250 surviving scores for the stage, orchestra, chorus, chamber and solo instruments, songs, hymns, folksong transcriptions and arrangements.

Morfydd’s songs are her most striking and original compositions: minimal settings like A Song of Sorrow and The Weeping Babe; deft patter songs tailored to the commercial market like Patrick’s Your Boy and For Jeannie’s Sake; ballads in the polished Edwardian style of Frank Bridge and Roger Quilter such as God made a lovely garden and In Cradle Land; the swooping melodic lines of Slumber-Song of the Madonna and Suo-Gân, and the dramatic, almost violent vocal outbursts of To Our Lady of Sorrows, La Tristesse and Gweddi y Pechadur. All are true singers’ songs, requiring technique, intellect and artistry to bring them off in performance.

Rhian - a wonderful piece about Morfydd Owen and an incredibly important woman in the industry. I studied composition at Cardiff University in the 80s and was awarded the Morfydd Owen Prize for Composition... it might be interesting to gather together some of the women who won this award over the years and to see what inspiration Morfydd Owen gave them.
Very happy to be involved.
Thank you for the blog
Julie

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Julie Taylor-Radcliffe

7/25/2018 01:13:23 am

I know the niece of Morfydd Owen. Megan is in her 99th year and lives in Scarborough. It will give both me and Meag immense pleasure to print out this information and be able to give Megan a picture of her very talented aunt as she has never seen an image of her.

Julie, thank you so much for writing and for your very kind response to the blog. That's a really good suggestion about the Morfydd Owen Prize and I'll discuss with Angela at Illuminate and see what we can do, perhaps in association with the Cardiff concert. The first recipient was Grace Williams and hopefully the Department would have a list of those who came after. It would be really interesting to hear how Morfydd may have inspired her Prizewinners, as you say. Look forward to keeping in touch and with all best wishes, Rhian

Thank you so much for all your work over the past several decades to illuminate uniMorfydd Owen's music and legacy. I was a Masters student at Bangor from 2002-2004, and remember first learning about her in Professor Wyn Thomas' Welsh music classes. I have been haunted ever since. I am currently doing my DMA in choral conducting at the Frost School of Music in Miami, FL. I plan to explore the lost choral works of Morfydd for my doctoral dissertation, and would love to connect with you about your research and experience with her music. She is virtually unheard of in America, and it is far past time to rectify that oversight! Please feel free to use my email address to contact me and hopefully we can begin a dialogue about bringing Morfydd's legacy Stateside!

I really appreciate your generous comments - thank you so much. I am also very interested to hear of your plans in regard to Morfydd Owen's choral music and will send you an e-mail as you kindly suggest.

Many accounts of Morfudd’s death include speculation filling gaps in the sad narrative suggesting a squalid end. Thomas Davies has published an authoritative reassertion of the cause as complications after appendectomy in the latest issue of ‘Y Traethodydd’. The article is in Welsh. Together with another medical historian I spent a whole day going over the details of his account in 2005 and since then found that the surgeon who performed the operation was already a Fellow not just a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. The family Doctor attending was a prominent member of the same church that Morfudd’s father in law attended and much to support a tragic but not squalid end

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Christopher Hill

8/14/2018 03:55:51 am

This is undoubtedly an important corrective from an authoritative source as there is a degree of ill-informed speculation still unfortunately in circulation. I would be most grateful if you could piont me to an English translation of Professor Davies's text or a summary thereof.

Julie Taylor-Radcliffe

7/25/2018 01:11:03 am

I have the pleasure of visiting an old lady by the name of Megan Owen who is in her 99th year and Morfydd was her aunt. Morfydd was sister to Megan's father. She has no idea that there is all this on the internet about her aunt, so I am going to print it off for her and as she has never seen a picture of her aunt, it will be lovely for her to learn more about her and see an image of her. Marvellous

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Norman Jacobs

8/6/2018 04:20:58 am

Dear Rhian Davies,

Please could you contact me since I am programming music by Morfydd Owen in a Celebrating Women Composers concert in November. Your expertise may be of assistance.

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Wynford Bellin

8/16/2018 07:15:01 am

The T G Davies article in Welsh emphasiszes the anachronism of querying the conduct of an appendectomy in a private house, since that would be the obvious choice for people in higher income brackets in what had been a minimal state health system. The surgeon was W. F. Brook who had recently performed an operation in the home of a copper magnate. Morfudd Owen's father in law had reached a highly paid bracket in the coal and steel industry.

Besides his own private practice W.F. Brook was a consultant surgeon at the Swansea General and given a military rank and responsibilities in the Western Region Military Hospital in Cardiff. If there was to be any assistance in the operation it would be the in-laws' family doctor Dr De Coverley Veale. Practice as now would rule out any family involvement such as Ernest Jones the husband. Ernest Jones himself was scrupulous about not practising as a doctor and only as a psychoanalyst. His reason for returning from Toronto to the UK was the health problems of his common - law wife.

T. G. Davies uses the psychological literature on distortion in long term autobiographical memory to point out the coherence in letters to Freud at the time maintaining unqualified admiration for Morfudd. The coherence is maintained when his and Katherine's first child is lost and he recalls the previous grief. Again it is maintained when writing "Free Association" 40 years after losing Morfudd. Hence slanderous accusation of disposing of an inconvenient wife can be dismissed. But both the surgeon and family doctor anyway would know straight away if there was anything involving a pregnancy. He also uses data from appendectomies in Manchester to hazard and estimate of the mortality rate for appendectomies at the time. In any case there was the complication of an abscess having formed.

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Wynford Bellin

8/17/2018 02:26:25 am

Dear Christopher Hill
In summarizing T. G. Davies' article in English I need to be clear it is not a contribution to hagiography either for Morfydd or Ernest Jones. T. G. Davies also reports evidence from his own witnesses of Ernest Jones' unacceptable behaviour with analysands and fellow female psychoanalysts. However Brenda Maddox makes a jump from one missing letter in the collections to heeding accusations of an offence for which Jones would have been hung. Although uncharacteristic of the rest of her biography of Jones, she shows no awareness of the carers that Rhian's full account includes during last days of Morfudd in her thesis. The life experience of the in-laws and the expertise of the surgeon and family doctor rule out any success with a conspiracy to conceal a capital offence.

Christopher Hill

8/19/2018 05:45:40 am

Dear Wynford

Many thanks for your summary of Dr Davies’s essay. It’s very fitting that the faith community whose membership seems to have been the source of the rumour mill in the first place should publish such an authoritative account addressing the “unanswered questions” surrounding Morfydd’s untimely death and especially the outrageous slanders suggesting Jones’s complicity.

Certainly Jones was no paragon of virtue and had well known character flaws but there can now surely be no doubting the unqualified admiration which, as you say, he maintained for his wife. As well as the sources Davies cites it’s worth noting the Biographical Memoir he published in 1924 (as a preface to a Memorial edition of her scores). Here he refers to “the profound devotion to her religion and her country, elements of her nature to which some of her most beautiful compositions bear witness”. He goes on to state: “The happiness she found in marriage, and the radical changes involved in her life, brought a temporary diminution of her musical activities, though there was every reason to expect that the experiences thus gained would lead to a deepening and enrichment of her creative powers …in her death Welsh music lost its brightest hope. What those lost who loved her personally can never be told”.

This seems to me to cast his attitude to both his wife’s musical career and religious faith in a more positive light than is often portrayed and is consistent with Dr Davies’s findings.

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Ronald Moore

8/29/2018 10:28:54 am

I was born in 31 Park Street Treforest, 1945, My mother told me of a singer who lived in Park Street, before I was born, but she never knew much about her. I am so pleased to hear the life story of Morfydd Owen, a true local talent, who seems to be lost in history to the natives of Treforest, except for the recent outcry of her being.

I have been singing for 50 years with Male Voice choirs, and offer my services in any capacity, to spread the awareness of this wonderful lady.
Ron Moore

Hello Ron and many thanks for your interesting comments about Morfydd Owen. Are you aware of a concert of her music that is taking place in Tabernacl, Efail Isaf, on Sunday evening, 9 September from 7pm? It would be lovely to see you there if possible.

All best wishes

Rhian

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Ron Moore

1/23/2019 09:15:51 am

Dear Rhian
I called at the shop in Park St. where the Blue Plaque is placed, I asked the owner if I could place a framed photograph of Morfydd inside the shop, he agreed and would be pleased if I could produce a short history with the picture.
Please could you advise me, and is it ok if I use a photograph from your book, or would you do that with a short write up.
Can you email me. thank you
Ron Moore.

What a lovely idea! I'd be very happy to help and will be in touch by email.

All best

Rhian

Ron Moore

1/30/2019 01:01:15 am

Dear Rhian
Any progress regarding the photograph of Morfydd in the shop. I know you must be very busy, if you want me to put something together + the photo I can do that, could I take a small informative passage from your book. I will send for your approval before framing it.
i'd like to strike while the kettles' boiling
Ron

Apologies for the delay while I awaited your email address. I have this now and will message you to discuss.

All best

Rhian

Wynford Bellin

8/29/2018 01:50:09 pm

We’ve got tickets for a Cowbridge Festival event, Holy Cross Church, Cowbrige Sunday 16th September 7.30. It’s called ‘Clorhs of Heaven’ with Elin Manahan Thomas and Jocelyn Freeman. We’re hoping to hear plenty of Morfydd’s music but the Efail Isaf previous Sunday is a sure bet. Is it a ticket event?

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Wynford Bellin

8/29/2018 03:39:44 pm

Dear Ron and Rhian

Hearty apologies for commenting before checking out all the excitement to be had that this first weekend of September and later this year with the events on www.arts.wales and and the ‘Morfydd Owen 100’ Facebook page

Many thanks for your messages overnight and no problem at all. The organisers at Efail Isaf are making a modest charge of £5 to cover costs as the concert includes two choirs and three soloists who will perform a range of Morfydd Owen's vocal, choral and piano music plus some of her Welsh folksong transcriptions.

Further information about all the events being promoted by Gregynog Festival to mark the Centenary from now until December are available on our website gregynogfestival.org, including concerts in Llangadfan (23 September), Newtown (25 September), Llanbryn-mair (29 September), Cardiff (13 November) and Aberystwyth (8 December).

There is a wider programme of talks and exhibitions and we will also be posting updates via the Morfydd Owen 100 accounts on Facebook and Twitter about the radio and television broadcasts that are planned between now until Christmas.

Hello Tom and thank you so much for your kind comments which I really appreciate. It would be lovely to think that some of Morfydd Owen's music could be heard by your audience in Canada, following broadcasts during centenary year in the UK, Netherlands, Mexico and Australia. It would also be a great follow-up to a festival that was held in Winnipeg in 1998.

Please be in touch again if I can be of any help in regard to her discography.

Hello Rhian,
Received an e-mail from you this morning not sure how to reply to you other than using this.
I'm very interested in having the opportunity of playing the music og Morfydd Owen's music on my series "Women in Music" Can you tell me if and what recordings are available.
Best wishes,
Tom host of Women in Music on www.thegrand101.com

Hello Tom and thank you for coming straight back to me. I would love to recommend possible tracks for broadcast, of course, and will send a message via your contact e-mail address at the radio station so that we can discuss.

Thanks again and all best

Rhian

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Dylan

5/17/2019 11:14:56 am

From the Wales Online article... "Why was the operation carried out in a house when a major hospital was only moments away? Why was there no post mortem?"

"And why was she buried without a death certificate?"

And...

Why, in which case, wasn't she taken to that hospital to recover right-away, afterwards?

Why? WO seems to a refer to this whole case as a mystery or unresolved. Has it been looked into since, officially?

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Wynford Bellin

5/18/2019 06:20:52 am

Good on you Dylan for raising the key questions about the omissions of key characters, networks and backcloth of the story.

Rhian Davies, in her lecture on the day of unveiling a plaque on the house where Morfydd died (Craig y Mor) praised the National Library for digitising the newspapers up to the year 1919.
Why operate at home? Only one newspaper mentions it.
Thomas Jones (the father-in-law living in Craig y Mor) was not just a mining engineer. He was very senior and aware that a government appointed referee for injury disputes, William Frederick was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons based down the hill at Longlands off St Helen's Road. He was also well known as a consultant at the Swansea Eye and General but would come up to Craig y Mor. Home appendectomies were the norm then just like home delivery of babies.

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Wynford Bellin

5/18/2019 07:01:19 am

Why burial before death certificate? The procedure at the time was J C Morris or R W Beor or CJC Wilson entered the report of the death in a book along with a note if a post-mortem was required or not. If not a form was given which an undertaker would ask for. As Morfydd's husband put it "the operation went well". . After care was with Dr F J Coverley De Veale, Glyn Eithin, Newton Road so conducting a post mortem would have been wrong as can be seen from a case in the Evening Express of 9 July 1910 "An Autopsy Unnecessary". So what now would be the green form for the undertaker would come straight away.

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Christopher Hill

5/18/2019 02:12:15 pm

Thank you Wynford for providing such important historical detail. It was a great shame that the SC4 drama on Morfydd which portrayed Jones as having conducted the operation and then sought to prevent a post-mortem to cover up his alleged negligence should have been so ill-informed with respect to the actual circumstances of Morfydd's fatal illness.

Cultural psychologists describe the situation as an impasse with two mnemonic communities - both unshakable in operating with just one simple schema. Older members of my Conway extended family (now gone) operated with "Angel pen ffordd: diafol pen tan" (An angel outside but a devil at home) and "Better an old man's darling than a young man's slave" when commenting on marriages but could qualify and elaborate on either. People who've asked me about the television drama grumbled it was implausibly hard on the husband. Anyway Monday 5 August in the Conway eisteddfod I'm giving a lecture with simultaneous translation. Croeso i bawb.

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Keely Morgan

7/14/2019 06:18:42 am

Hi Rhian
I am a soprano, originally from Mumbles, studying at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. I am planning on giving a lecture recital on the life and work of Morfydd Owen for my final year module. I would to discuss with you your research and experience.